May 19 - Changes to adding new people

Created on: May 19, 2015 21:21

Updated on: April 09, 2018 18:00

Adding and importing people to PCO Services is now much easier. Anywhere you can type to search for a person's name, you now not only see people you've already added to PCO Services, you also see people in your main PCO People account that aren't in PCO Services yet and you can import them from there. You also have a button to create a new person (if your permissions allow it). These things were both already possible from the main people tab, but now you can do it from anywhere.

Anyone that is NOT already in your PCO Services account is shown in gray. If you click to import them, you'll get a popup reminding you of this, and even telling you how many more people are allowed on your current pricing package. You can then decide to import them from there, or cancel.

More Detail

When Planning Center first launched 9 years ago, it was just one app. Since then, that app was renamed to Planning Center Services so that we could add lots of new apps, like PCO Resources, Check-Ins, People, Registrations, & Giving. In order to make each of those apps talk to each other, they needed to be able to share people.

To share people between apps, we 'moved' each person's master information out of PCO Services and into our new app, PCO People. You never saw this happen, but behind the scenes it was a big change to allow all PCO apps to access the same set of people. After that change, it was possible for a person to be in your main Plannnig Center account, but not in PCO Services.

The easiest way to think of this is that ALL people in your account/church can show in PCO People, and you can add any of those people to your other Planning Center apps. For example, if your church uses PCO Registrations, you might have a brand new person register to attend High School camp. They are added to your main PCO account, but they aren't added to the PCO Services app (especially since PCO Services charges you based on the number of people). If you want to add them to a volunteer team in the future, you can now do this from anywhere within PCO Services, not just the people page.